Ira Wilsker

For the past few decades, an annual Thanksgiving Day event in my house was to get up early, and bring in the log-sized newspaper weighted down with countless Black Friday sale books. Admittedly, sometimes we would go out late Wednesday night to get the early edition of the paper at a local convenience store. The six of us would scour the ads, mixing wishful thinking with a shopping strategy intended to maximize the bargains we could purchase at the local stores.

If you have a smartphone or tablet, there is about a 75 percent chance that it is running some form of the Android operating system. As of last year, the latest figures available, the installed user base of Android powered devices, both existing and newly sold, is more than Windows, Mac OS X, and Apple iOS devices combined. More than 81 percent of all smartphones sold in 2013 were running the Android operating system. For those who may be unaware, Android is an open source Google product, based on the established Linux kernel.

About a year ago, I wrote about my then new favorite real-time smart phone road routing program Waze. At the time, Google had recently purchased Waze from its Israeli developer for over a billion dollars, a princely sum that the developer generously shared with his handful of employees.

Listening to the news can often be disturbing, especially when we hear stories about massive password thefts. Recently, there were widely broadcast reports 5 million Gmail passwords were stolen, and available online to anyone wishing to use them for nefarious purposes (money.cnn.com/2014/09/10/technology/security/gmail-hack/index.html).

I often see people walking along a street, in a parking lot, or other location, who are busily using their smart phones, often oblivious to their surroundings. In law enforcement and the military, it is emphasized that individuals need to have “situational awareness” and be fully cognizant about what is going on around them, especially potential threats, at all times. Pedestrians who have their noses deeply buried in their phones are typically unaware of what is going on around them, making them easy targets for those miscreants who may wish to do them harm.

Now that many of us are in back-to-school mode, it might be noteworthy to introduce a new, free product from Google for students and teachers, Google Classroom. Officially launched on Aug. 12, more than 100,000 educators from more than 45 countries had previously signed up for a functional preview starting last May. While Google is well understood to generate revenue through various forms of advertising, all of the components of Google Classroom (including Gmail) will not contain any advertising, but will still remain free for student and teacher use.

Recently, I attended a weeklong “Summer Cyber Security Workshop” at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. While we delved into the intricacies of hacking, encryption, penetration testing, cyber forensics, critical infrastructure protection and cybercrime, there was also evidence of a consistent demand from industry for workers trained in the broad field of cyber security.

Over the past several weeks, I have taken several out-of-town road trips. On these trips I used a novel free smart phone app for routing and traffic information called Waze (waze.com). There are an abundance of apps that function with the integral GPS built into almost all smart devices, including smart phones and tablets.

Our cell phones are often wonderful devices; in addition to the traditional voice phone calls, they also can provide enhanced functionality with Internet access, cameras and SMS (text messaging). Now that smart phones have become the primary communications mode for most of us, it has also become a fertile field for crooks capitalizing on the functionality of our devices.

While we harbor no disrespect for the Wall Street Journal who called us “that scrappy little paper from Southeast Texas,” we prefer to think of ourselves as simple seekers of the truth. We’re of the opinion that headlines and sound bites never tell the whole story. Our readers demand all the facts, facets and flavors of every story or event. And, they expect to be informed, educated and stirred to action.